


i think i'm gonna win this time

by molotovhappyhour



Series: The Force Shall Free Me [9]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Star Wars Setting, Jedi Wedding, M/M, Marriage Proposal, The First Ever Jedi Wedding, Wedding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-31
Updated: 2016-05-07
Packaged: 2018-05-30 06:02:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6411862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/molotovhappyhour/pseuds/molotovhappyhour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Holy shit,” Levi's words are breathed against his mouth, and there’s a warm pressure against Eren's shoulders in the Force, soothing the ache Levi’s boots had left behind. “Holy shit, I wanna marry you.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> happy birthday my beloved son. 
> 
> i'm so happy i wrote this you guys
> 
> rating will go up for the next chapter!

(“ _my mother was chalactan_.” It had been a soft confession, left inside the space between the pilot and copilot’s seats for Levi to acknowledge if he chose to do so. The console had been blinking slowly but rhythmically, hyperspace splitting around them in streams of flashing pinks and blues. “ _i don’t know if i ever told you that._ ”

Levi had turned to regard him, his attention prickling at Eren’s skin like it always does. A warmth had rushed through his bloodstream, tickling the insides of his bones.

“ _you hadn’t_ ,” Levi had replied after a few moments. “ _but i can see it in your nose. in your skin._ ” A small smile. “ _your eyebrows. she must’ve been a heartbreaker_.”

Eren had laughed, the tension from talking about his history uncoiling inside his stomach, the weird restlessness about visiting his mother’s homeworld retreating to the back of his mind. “ _what makes you say that_?”

“ _had to get your stellar good looks from somewhere_ ,” Levi’s smile was hidden as he lifted his sleeve to rub at the tip of his nose.

Eren’s hadn’t been hidden at all.)

“Do you think Erwin knew?” The jungle swallows Eren’s voice when he speaks, like it swallows almost everything here—animal sounds, whispers into comlinks, footsteps.  But it doesn’t muffle the drifting shapes in the Force around them, the bounty hunters’ serrated edges cutting through the flickering sensations of the forest itself, just like it doesn’t muffle the feeling of Levi right behind him, scoring the ridge of his spine with proximity burns. “About this.”

He can’t see the look Levi gives him with their backs almost pressed together the way they are, but he can feel it. “What do you think?”

“Probably,” Eren says with no hesitation. “We never get the restful assignments.”

It wouldn’t take a tactical genius to figure out _why_ the bounty hunters were sent here, to be fair. Erwin may have known, sure, but Levi had probably known, too, and had already planned for this inevitability—it comes from being in the galaxy long enough, from understanding the ebb and flow of people long enough. If Eren thinks about it, as they take steps around in a slow, small circle, he thinks _he_ can pretty much figure out why they’re here; the Jedi and the bounty hunters.

Chalactan monks, after all, are one of the only divisions of people in the galaxy, regardless of species, that are resistant to most forms of torture. Further still, fully-trained monks are resistant to all Jedi mind tricks and Force-influenced emotional pressures. All of this mental fortification is done through intense meditation techniques, through a balancing of emotions, through a dissociation of the outside world with the inside world.

Having a temple that can teach techniques like this is bad for business in the criminal underworld, whose successes and failures can ride on the use of torture. Having Jedi there to _learn_ techniques like those—or, Force-forbid, teach their _own_ techniques to the monks—is even _worse_ for business, makes criminal organizations vulnerable.

And if Jedi were to visit the monks, in plain sight, with their visitation as a matter of galactic public record, well, that _basically_ an act of aggression. It makes no difference to the galactic underworld that Chalactan monks aren’t generally Force-sensitive.

Effectively speaking, Eren supposes, they’re the _bait_ —that which makes the scum of the galaxy crawl out from beneath its stones to protect their shitty businesses: drug running, species-trafficking, assassinations. There’s no one in the Order that knows the inner workings of crime rings like Levi. And there’s no one in the Order who knows Levi like Eren.

(It makes sense then, Erwin sending them. They’re the only two Jedi needed for a defense operation this small.

But that doesn’t mean he has to _like_ it.)

A warm stripe is pulled up his spine in the Force, pulling Eren out of his head and back into the jungle, the humidity sitting heavy on his tongue with the taste of so much _life_. Sweat beads at his temples.

Levi pulls the warmth back down in the same motion, and Eren can almost feel a smile inside it. It touches the corner of his own mouth as he stops, shifting his weight on his feet as Levi does the same behind him.

“Are you ready?” Levi asks, the whisper in the Force brushing against the back of his neck. The shapes around them are just as still as they are, oozing malicious intent into the air around them in a noxious cloud. It reminds Eren of himself in a way that makes his stomach turn.

“When you are,” Eren tells him, swallowing the sensation to keep it inside his chest, feeling Levi coil in the Force like a spring.

They wait two heartbeats—and then they move.

Eren launches forward, across the clearing they’d found themselves surrounded in, his feet thumping against the ground as loud as possible. Even with the vegetation everywhere, even though the earth is damp, there’s _no_ way he can’t be heard by the bounty hunters waiting to pounce on them. He hits the treeline and barrels through it, counting the anomalous spots between the background noise of the jungle’s natural life as he goes.

There are eight bounty hunters spread out around the clearing, each pressed up against a tree, each one holding either a blaster or a slugthrower. Eren passes two in the forest, feels each of them flinch against the edges of his awareness, feels both of them flutter backward to press up against two more trees, closer to the clearing’s edge.

There’s a flicker of a thought somewhere, of the safety being turned off on a weapon, and Eren changes direction as a stream of laser fire screams its way into the side of a tree, scattering tree bark and the smell of scorched wood behind him. There’s no follow-up, no more laser fire on his tail, and he changes direction a second time, pushing himself into a Force-assisted jump, the soles of his feet coming to rest against a tree as he leaps from one to the other.

His jumps shake the leaves, scatter birds. But most importantly, they make _noise_.

The two bounty hunters he’d passed move backward two more trees, hovering at the edge of the clearing that both Eren and Levi had left behind. Two more, close enough by to be disconcerted by all the ruckus he’s causing, move backward in the same direction.

(“ _bounty hunters are really fucking superstitious,_ ” Levi had told him once. They’d been in a cantina on Tatooine, their conversation swallowed by the controlled chaos of Outer Rim bars. “ _which means that a great many of them are easy to scare when you’re a jedi._ ” His eyes had glittered like flint and his smile had been sharp.

Eren had licked his lips and listened.

“ _on the outer rim,_ ” he’d continued, “ _jedi are legends. myths that parents tell their children about so they can still believe in heroes. that sort of reputation makes it easy to get what you want. no mind-tricks required._ ”)

Levi brushes against him in the Force from the other side of the clearing, flitting through the trees like a spirit, and Eren knows that the only sounds he’s making are the occasional crack of a twig or the soft shiver of leaves. His tactics are a little more subtle than Eren’s are, when it comes to herding people, but they’re no less effective. If anything, the assholes on his side are a little more terrified than the one’s Eren gets to handle.

Levi touches him again, a sigh against the side of his face. The sensation itches its way up and down his arms, calling his lightsaber into his grip as he perches upon a tree-branch, tucked inside the curve of space where it meets the trunk. For a moment, he’s immersed within his mother’s homeworld—feels the flutter of animal life against his skin, hears the sigh of leaves in humid breezes, can almost pinpoint the echo of what his mother must’ve felt like in the Force when she was alive. But the pause is only a split-second long, the _snap-hiss_ of his lightsaber overwhelming the sound of his soft landing against the forest floor, mimicking the exact same sound across the way where Levi’s own lightsabers are in his hands.

All four of Eren’s responsibilities retreat to hide within the clearing, followed closely by the four that Levi had handled, all eight of them standing back-to-back in a defensive circle, much in the same way that Levi and Eren had been standing only minutes before.

He shifts his weight to the balls of his feet, his bootsteps silent as he makes his way back toward the edge of the clearing, the hum of his lightsaber being the only sound to precede his arrival. The sour taste of fear clogs his windpipe the closer he gets, sitting atop a cold hill of commitment—it’s common among Outer Rim bounty hunters, Levi had said. Money and fear are the primary motivators; money for security, fear of a job incomplete. Employers aren’t known for their beneficence regarding second chances.

Eren waits within the shadows of the treeline, knowing that the bounty hunters know that he’s there, knowing that they can see the glow of his lightsaber even if they can’t quite see him. Across the clearing, Levi’s own lightsabers are just as visible, the hum of them both just as grating on the sinuses.

They brush against each other in the Force, a mutual leaning on one another, and a wire goes taut between them.

When the wire snaps, the two of them move forward, in tandem, from the shadows and into the light.

The blasterfire is easy enough to deflect as the two of them move forward from opposite sides of the circle of bounty hunters. The slugs from the slugthrowers are harder to handle. While some chances are that the slugs vaporize the moment they hit the lightsaber, others could be that the slug gets by, or that it glances against the saber’s side, shaving off only a fraction of the bullet itself.

It would be more dangerous, probably, if Eren and Levi weren’t exactly who they are.

Eren dances between sets of slugfire, aiming deflected blaster bolts into the jungle around them, or upward toward the sky above. It takes a moment’s breath to reload every slug and these bounty hunters, superstitious as they are, are experts in their field. When one reloads, someone else fires. When they reload, the previous one is already compensating.

And so one must take out the bounty hunter covering the one that’s reloading.

Eren gathers the Force around him, hopping two steps backward and holding out his hand with his fingers splayed wide. And then he pushes _out_ , skidding against the soft earth.

Leaves and fallen branches, soil and small stones—all of them rush forward with the shove Eren had started in the Force. The bounty hunters stumble, though an Abyssin topples end over end with the force of Eren’s push, an unfortunate consequence of their species’ height and size.

Levi falls into the push for half a moment before springing backward with the momentum, cutting one lightsaber off and clipping it to his belt in the same motion, using his hand to bear his weight. The entire scene looks choreographed, the flow of the Force stretching between them in a seamless display of unity. When one pushes, the other leans; when one moves, the other compensates.

And as Eren leaps back into the disorganized mess that had been the bounty hunters’ circle, there’s a feeling creeping up on him.

It’s warm as it crawls up his spine with gentle tendrils before rushing up from the soles of his feet to rumble beneath his skin. When Eren bows under Levi’s Force-assisted, boot-first landing—a flutter of movement, the brush of fabric as their bodies move in perfect gravitational synchronicity—an electric shock passes between them, raising the hairs on his arms and neck. Levi collides with a Dug, hard enough to slam them against a tree trunk on the opposite side of the clearing, leaving them motionless against the forest floor.

This feeling—this reawakening, this whatever-the-fuck—seems to be the same as it’s always been, but if he reaches out, if he _looks_ closely enough, it’s different, too. It’s something else. There’s the way it’s always felt, and then there’s something beneath it. Eren doesn’t have to reach as far to find Levi there. The middle ground between them is smaller, as if they’re not so far apart, as if there really is no middle space at all.

It’s like there’s the two of them, and everyone else.

And Eren feels _alive_. He feels reborn, _baptized_ , like everything is back in balance where it’s supposed to be. It’s him and Levi against everyone, against the _universe_ , like they were made to complement each other this way. There is nowhere Eren belongs like he does by Levi’s side, and he feels more like himself than he has in—than he has in—

(He’d bowed under Levi’s rotating strike like he’d _known_ to do, could feel every movement of his style like he’d memorized it in his own muscles. The outer edges of his walls had started cracking, like permecrete left behind in the elements.

He’d almost opened up then, during that spar that Levi had insisted on. He’d almost turned toward the sunlight that Levi had been to him for so many years of his life, had almost fallen back into their balance, had almost—

But then Omwat had come rushing back, had hit him so hard that _Levi_ had lived it, inside his head, and the walls had repaired themselves, had reinforced themselves.

And Eren realizes that it’s been even longer than that that he’s come close to feeling this way.

Maybe as long ago as Mandalore.)

He laughs aloud, the feeling bursting from behind his teeth too much to hold inside his chest.

Three bounty hunters flee toward the treeline, backing up carefully with their weapons pointed outward and Eren’s way is blocked by a Trandoshan, making _his_ pursuit of them impossible, at least at the moment. But Eren can feel Levi behind him, can feel him burning up the Force with his presence, and he shuts down his own lightsaber and clips it to his belt in a practiced motion before Levi even has to speak.

“Express lane,” Levi says, already making the short jump onto Eren shoulders, even as Eren already bends his knees to absorb the shock, tucking himself into a crouch as the Trandoshan’s intent to strike clots in his mouth. Using the Force, Levi launches himself into the air, Eren rising from his crouch to spring Levi upward at the same time his head slams against the underside of the Trandoshan’s chin, knocking them backward with a low snarl, even as their claws tear the fabric of Eren’s outermost robe.

Eren hears Levi’s lightsabers come to life as he plummets down through the forest’s canopy, can hear the distressed screams of the bounty hunters that got unlucky enough to be Levi’s goal.

The Trandoshan and two other bounty hunters are left with him, and Eren swings his leg up in a roundhouse kick to the side of the Trandoshan’s jaw. It feels almost like an overextension of his own muscles, aiming for someone so fucking _tall_ , but his heel connects, bringing the Trandoshan down to a level that’s even enough to bring his knee sharply into contact with their stomach.

An elbow to the face leaves the bounty hunter as a lump upon the forest floor.

Two pinpricks of focus flit across the back of Eren’s head, and he turns to find the last two bounty hunters—both human—ready to fire their weapons and solve their problem.

But they don’t feel this battle the way Eren does, and so when one of Levi’s lightsabers breaks the trees to slap into Eren’s palm, the bounty hunters go from collected to terrified in the time it takes for the echoes to be swallowed by the jungle.

Levi’s lightsaber comes to life in Eren’s palm, an extension of Levi’s own presence in the Force, and the last of the bounty hunters are subdued in no time at all. A flick of the wrist, a turn on his heel that snatches their legs from under them, a sharp strike to the back of the skull that steals the world from their sight.

“Eat _shit_ ,” Eren says, his breath coming in short huffs, grinning wide even though none of the assailants are conscious enough to appreciate that fact. “Get fucked.” He toes one of the humans’ shoulders with his boot, wiggling them a little more harshly than necessary to make sure they’re out for the long haul.

“Showboating,” Levi clicks his tongue, sounding just this side of winded as he comes up from behind him as Eren had known he would. “That’s not very Jedi of you.”

Levi’s hand is out to meet him when Eren sets his lightsaber back into his palm, his fingers curling around it in such a way that they brush against Eren’s own. It sends goosebumps all along his body, coaxes himself to wrap himself up inside Levi within the Force, brushing the too-cold-too-warm sensation against his face like a fucking security blanket.

The way Levi sighs, it almost seems as if he’s doing the exact same thing.

But that doesn’t stop Eren from speaking.

“The way you kissed me this morning wasn’t very Jedi of _you_ , but here we are. Me, being very un-Jedi-like. You, enabling me.”

When Levi laughs, he does it with his whole body, the Chalactan sun cutting along the side of his face, sharpening his bone structure even as his laughter rounds the corners of his cheekbones. Colour rises into the hollows of his cheeks, sets his eyes alight with something spectacular, and Eren feels his heart get caught between rising into his windpipe or dropping out of his body completely.

He’s so in love, _all the time_ —but it’s euphoric to let himself _feel_ it like this.

“That’s fair,” Levi tells him, his words breathed out on a wheeze. Eren hadn’t really said anything _that_ funny, but before he can say so, Levi reaches up to press the palm of his hand against Eren’s cheek. Warmth rises beneath Levi’s fingers, surely. Eren can feel it blooming in his face. “You good?”

“Yeah.” He leans into the touch, just a little. Feels some tension bleed out of Levi’s shoulders. Watches his face soften. “I almost got clipped, but mostly I just need to do laundry.”

Levi snorts and it wrinkles his nose as he drags his thumb back and forth in a gentle caress against Eren’s cheek. “They’re going to stop giving you robes if you keep getting them torn.”

“Maybe then I’ll actually get to wear something I look _good_ in.”

“Oh, so you think that Jedi robes aren’t flattering?”

Eren feels a smile pulling at his lips, feels the same one pulling at Levi’s own. “Well, I mean, on _you_...”

Another laugh, and this is one Eren can taste in his own mouth, anticipating the kiss that Levi leans up to give him. He stoops, just slightly, to meet him, almost parts his own lips to deepen the kiss before it begins, but Levi speaks before he can.

“Holy shit,” the words are breathed against his mouth, and there’s a warm pressure against his shoulders in the Force, soothing the ache Levi’s boots had left behind. “Holy _shit_ , I wanna marry you.”

(Something inside him fills to bursting—a dream Eren hadn’t even known he’d _had_. It’s not something—that’s something he’d never thought about, something he’d never considered wanting, not when it had seemed like Levi was so far out of reach.

What he has now is all he’s ever wanted, and yet something twists inside him anyway.

It feels like a _craving_ coming back from the grave.)

Eren swallows, shivering even though the sun is still high, even though the humidity is sticking to his skin, and he crushes the thought beneath his heart before it can take root and eat at him like everything else had before—before.

And then he laughs, only slightly, pulling Levi as close as he can to kiss him, prying his mouth open with his tongue and savouring the sound breathed out against his lips.

And he knows that this is good enough. Eren knows that he is happy.

-

Eren hasn’t looked happier in all the time that Jean has known him, and he’s known him since they were _kids_. There’s always been something a little sharp in his smiles, something that always seemed to be haunting every step he took, and everyone in the Temple has always known that.

There are still some things that cling to his shoulders, and those things are hard to miss. Like he won’t look at his reflection. His jaw still sets in an angry shape when the Council calls him for standard reports. He still reaches for the good in things, blinded by something that Jean has never understood.

But he seems so _different_ now, despite all of that. And it’s not just his change in wardrobe.

“What was it like?” Eren peels one eye open, the shadows of the meditation chamber wrapping around his body much in the way the darkness of the undercity had clung to his face years before. It’s weird to think about that now, when the contexts aren’t even all that similar, when the sleeplessness beneath Eren’s eyes are looking better than they have at any time since.

“What was what like?” He shuts the eye he’d opened, shifting on the cushion beneath his backside. “That’s the least specific question I’ve ever been asked, and I’ve been asked a _lot_ of non-specific questions. Besides, I thought we were supposed to be meditating? The younglings are kicking my _ass_ in that class.”

“They wouldn’t be kicking your ass if you’d done it right the first time like you were supposed to.” Jean shifts on his own cushion, pulling the Force in when he breathes to soothe the ache beginning in his shoulders. “But I _meant_ how was Chalacta? I’ve never seen it.”

“It was _hot_ ,” Eren speaks almost before Jean finished his question. “And humid. Jungle everywhere.” He tips his head from side to side, rolling his head on his shoulders, and the dragon he creates within the Force unwinds itself a little, loosening the meditative tension blooming around Eren’s body. “But it was pretty. One of the greenest places I’ve ever been to, besides Ithor.”

“What about the Temple?”

“Why are you so _nosy?_ ” Eren opens his eyes only to narrow them, but a smile begins to reveal itself on his mouth. “The Temple was cool. The monks were very nice. Levi and I,” his breath hitches only barely, a verbal tick that a lot of people would miss, “were even asked to meditate there. _Super_ exciting.”

“Not for _you_ , probably.”

His snort is muffled by the soundproofing in the room, but the wrinkling of his nose gives him away. “ _Okay_ , I’ll remember to bring you along next time that we get _free meditation tips_ from an assignment.”

Jean huffs and the conversation tapers off, blending in with the almost-perfect silence of the chamber. It’s made to be this quiet, made to keep noise outside the chamber and peace within it. But it’s just—it’s _uncomfortable_ , Eren being this quiet. Jean _knows_ there’s a lot going on, can feel it in the Force around them, can feel it squirming against the floor restlessly.

The silence tempts Jean to say something else, to ask what the _fuck_ is bothering him, but Eren speaks before he can, and he almost sags forward with relief.

“Have you ever thought about getting married?”

Until, of course, he processes what Eren says.

“ _What?_ ” He’s lucky that the room is structured the way it is, lucky that no one just heard that barely-human screech of a question. Luckier still that Eren doesn’t rise to meet him, though the dragon of his presence twitches and curls tighter around his body, the Force going heavy. Heat rises in the room as sweat beads on the back of his neck.

“Nevermind,” Eren says after a moment, and his tone brings to mind the hissing of sand against the shell of a house, a whisper of a distant storm blowing in. “Forget I said anything.”

(His eyes had been dark, that day. He’d been striding through the atrium, toward the stairs of the Temple, and something had been swirling around his shoulders like a cloud. To breathe it in had been to burn his lungs.

“ _where the fuck are you going?_ ” Jean had asked, even though his chest had ached from whatever it was that was eating Eren up from the inside out. It had been a wonder his skin wasn’t peeling from his bones.

“ _hapes_ ,” Eren had told him, had lied through his _teeth_ , and his voice had rumbled like thunder, had hissed against the floor like the whisper of the beast that lived inside him. Jean had almost expected him to breathe fire. “ _i’m going to hapes._ ”)

Jean corrects himself, unfolding his hands from their sedate knot in his lap. “Wait,” he says. Eren’s eyes only narrow. “Wait, I—what do you mean?”

“It’s nothing.” The temperature drops only slightly as Eren curls back inside himself, the shadows stretching down over his face in the dimness. It makes it near-impossible to see the expression on his face. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I’ve just, uh.” There’s a distance here. It’s been here since Eren had lied about Hapes, since the fucking trial, since—maybe since before that. Maybe it has started after their journey to the undercity, with Eren covered in Hutt gore, convinced of the nobility of his action. And he’d been right, you know. That Hutt had been absolute scum. “I’ve never thought about it before.”

Eren watches him as his shoulders slowly drop. “Me either,” he says finally. “I’ve never really thought about getting married before.”

Everyone in the Temple knows about the two of them—Eren and Levi. No one speaks about it, not really, but everyone notices that Eren comes out of Levi’s quarters every morning, everyone sees the bruises left behind by wandering mouths on either of their throats, everyone can feel them brush against one another in the Force, even if it’s only briefly.

And there are rumours that they’d been seen sharing kisses in any number of places.

So it stands to reason that Jean knows, too. But he feels like he should’ve heard it _from_ Eren, like they should’ve talked about this by now. It’s been months since Eren had “gotten lost” in the undercity, since the trial, since Omwat. And Eren’s been—he’s not a subtle man, and he’s always—

 _Fuck_ , Jean should’ve spoken about this sort of thing more. They should’ve talked about it together. They’re _friends_ , for Force’s sake. They’re friends.

(“ _the grandmaster doesn’t like me very much, does he?_ ” Eren had asked him once. Jean had never once figured that maybe Eren doesn’t tell him things because of the man that trained him.

He never thought he’d had to.)

“Are you thinking about it now?” Jean asks, carefully. This sort of thing is difficult, these days. It’s hard to try and find the easy friendship they’d had before, where Eren would ask Jean for some ridiculous advice or favour and they’d both get in trouble in the process. He doesn’t know when Eren stopped trusting him. “With... Levi?”

Eren’s cheeks go dark, noticeable even in the striking shadows of the chamber, and he clears his throat a little. “I—I’m happy with what we have. The—I’m happy how we are.”

“But are you thinking about getting married?”

Eren unfolds his hands from his sleeves, tapping the index finger of one hand against the speckled marble. He drags that finger from one white speck to the next, as if drawing links between stars upon the floor.

And then he says, “it’s hard.” And nothing else.

Jean pushes on his walls, gently. They used to be so good at this when they were padawans. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Eren’s lips twitch in a smile and his finger pauses on one of the white marble spots. “This. Everything. It’s hard, wanting things. It’s hard to have it, too. You start to feel fucking greedy, start to feel like you ask for too much. I’m happy where I am. Thinking about getting married, _ever_ , seems like I’m just taking the piss out of the good thing I have now.” His lips thin, the smile dying before it fully forms, before it can reveal teeth. “I don’t want to lose what I have now, you know? I don’t want to want anything else.”

(It’s surreal, a little, listening to Eren speak this way about himself. He seems to think of himself as the most selfish person on the _planet_ , maybe even the universe, and Jean has to wonder what it is he sees when he looks in the mirror before he inevitably ends up walking away.

Jean hasn’t met a person that cares as much about others as Eren fucking Jaeger.)

“I’d go,” Jean speaks to the shadows and to Eren.

“What?” Eren lifts his head from where he’d been watching his finger draw lines on the floor.

“To your wedding.” He pauses, twists his lips, and finally lets himself feel the sting from months ago when he says, “if you’d invite me, anyway.”

Eren blinks slowly, like he always does when he’s thinking. “I’d invite you. If I ever got married.” It feels like an apology, the way it stretches through the room, cooling down the corners that had been too-roughly touched by his anger. “Would you really come?”

Jean nods. He nods and he thinks that this is what trust feels like—what it had felt like when they were younger, what it had felt like before whatever happened to Eren that started Omwat. This is the kind of friendship they had, before.

And if he’s being honest with himself, he thinks he’d really fucking missed it.

“I’d really come.” He pauses again, searching for the right way to say exactly what he’s thinking, the words that won’t make Eren put back on his acerbic face, coupled with his caustic tounge. “I’m happy for you, you know? The both of you.”

Eren smiles, then. It’s small, and there’s a spectre behind it that makes it sad, but it’s there. And he says, “I know you are.”

(Jean wonders what it must feel like, loving someone as much as he loves Levi. Wonders what it has to feel like to know it’s on your face and written in the curve of your shoulders. Wonders what it feels like to look at someone and know that they would hang the stars for you in any way you wanted.)

“Do you want to spar, or something?” Jean asks, already pushing himself up from the starfield of the floor. “It’s been a while since I kicked your ass.”

“Ex _cuse_ me? I believe the last time we sparred, I kicked your ass so hard that every youngling in the Temple pitied you afterward.” Eren follows suit, standing in a fluid motion that he _had_ to have picked up somewhere. He’s never been so good at that.

Shit, it’s like seeing Levi in him.   

“I don’t remember it that way,” Jean tells him, speaking over his shoulder as the door to the chamber whispers open, bathing the both of them in the light.

When Eren grins, it’s almost painfully familiar, and yet it’s something that looks entirely different than anything that’s ever been on his lips before. “You wouldn’t. That’s why _I_ do the remembering, and _you_ do all the grunt work.”

“ _Hardly_. Who’s the dude that never gets sent on stealth missions again?”

“Why is that _always_ your go-to? When will you get new material?”

Jean steps into the corridor. Eren steps into the light.

 

-

(“ _have you ever wanted to go to a wedding?_ ” It had been asked into the shadows of the meditation chamber, the star-speckled marble of the floor winking in the dim light.

Hanji had blinked, their eyes opening to glitter behind the lenses of their glasses. “ _i’ve never really thought about it. no one i know has ever gotten married._ ” They’d cocked their head, a grin stretching their mouth. “ _why do you ask?_ ”)

Mandalore rotates slowly, suspended above the smooth surface of the table in the cone of holoprojected light. Beside it sit the planet’s general statistics: population, average rainfall  and temperatures over the course of the planetary year, standard wildlife expectations, all very normal stuff.

Levi plucks one of the statistics from the right side of the planet and inflates it with a flick of his fingers, skimming the average temperature and precipitation until he gets to the winter months for the northern hemisphere. While they don’t necessarily _look_ familiar—he hadn’t been overtly aware of the exact temperature the last time he’d been there, or anything—he thinks he can imagine how they would feel.

After all, it was only a little over two years ago that he’d been there last. And there are few things he remembers as clearly as Mandalore.

(A biting chill coaxing colour from beneath his cheeks—but that had probably been all Eren, flashing him smiles, licking chapped lips, catching watery winter sunlight like he’d crawled from stardust simply to be bathed in it.

The feeling of those chapped lips on his.

The warmth that had blossomed beneath his ribs.)

Another flick of his fingers and the statistics go back to their place beside the planet, uninterrupted in its unhurried rotation. It’s weird, sitting in the Archives and watching Mandalore turn on its axis, the afternoon sun refracting from the endless transparisteel of the cityscape to stream through the wide window, dripping through the hologram to dance across the polished wroshyr wood table as airspeeders disrupt the reflections. 

Weird isn’t the right way to put it, not really. It’s not so much that the _action_ of sitting here is weird—he’s done this hundreds of times, perhaps thousands. He’s watched countless planets rotate over this exact table. There’s been Kuat and Tatooine, Dantooine and Hapes, Corellia and Mon Calamari. Levi remembers looking at Coruscant at this table. Remembers looking at Duros. Remembers looking at Omwat.

This is weird— _different_ —in the way that his palms are sweating. Different in the way his fingertips tap against the polished wood, leaving fingerprints behind. Different in the way that, even though there’s nothing more to learn, nothing more to _see_ , he’s still here, watching Mandalore from a space-eye view.

(Different isn’t the word either.

It’s _novel_. Even though he’s done this so many times, even though he’s done this in _exactly_ the same place it’s fucking novel. This chair is still here at this table, this table is still tucked by the window, and Levi is in love.

It’s so _new_ to allow himself to feel that way. To taste it in his mouth when he swallows, to breathe Eren in deep enough that his head spins, to be _in love_ and to know that Eren’s just as far gone as he is every fucking time they look at each other.

It’s breathtaking. _Life-changing_. Terrifying.

Nothing has changed, and yet everything has changed between them.)

There’s a brush of sensation against Levi’s cheek that draws his attention away from the planet above the table, and he feels Eren coming long before he sees him reflected in the sheer chrome wall adjacent to the closest shelf. It begins in gentle waves and soft caresses, turning into a more insistent presence the closer he gets, until he rounds the closest shelf and stops two steps away from the table.

The Coruscanti sun touches him in the way it always does, curling about his features with delicate fingers, worshipping the skin it sits on. It smooths away the lingering shadows beneath his eyes, painted there by persistent nightmares that he won’t yet talk about. It’s been four standard months since they shared their second kiss, since Levi had opened himself up to bursting, since they’d torn away the middle ground and found themselves entirely _together_ , breathing in the stardust of their newborn universe—of their _reborn_ universe.

It may very well take another four months to kiss the shadows away completely. Maybe longer than that.

But there’s a crooked grin sitting on his mouth, shadows stroked into submission by sunlight and good humour, and Levi finds himself almost dizzy with the urge to kiss it and try the smile on himself. And—looking at Eren’s face the way he is, swallowing the urge to kiss him like he is—he knows that he’ll be here in four months, in six months, in six _years_ , in—he’ll be here always. He’s loved him for _years_. These recent months are only new in the way that he can let himself say so.

It is then that the words come to him, unstoppable.

“What do you think about Mandalore?” Levi asks him, the his voice scattering across the table like stones before clattering against the marble floor, coming to rest beside the toes of Eren’s boots.

“Close,” Eren tells him, his reflection mimicking the curve of his lips around the words in the polished surface of the wall. Neither Eren nor the reflection make eye contact with one another. “But we’re going to Kashyyyk next. I was thinking that maybe we should leave the Wookiee jokes at home, this time, because I think people _might_ wonder if Erwin really did fuck one. Or they’ll think that Senator Zacharias is, like, an _actual_ Wookiee, even though he’s Corellian, but—“

“I meant for the wedding,” Levi speaks before Eren pulls him into a conversation that will distract him. There’s already a fond smile tugging at the corners of his own mouth, and if he lets him keep going, there won’t be the opportunity to talk about _this_ —about the hologram of Mandalore, about Chalacta, about them. The sooner they plan, the sooner they can—the sooner it can happen.

Eren blinks, slowly. The smile on his mouth grows heavy and his eyebrows furrow. “What?”

“The wedding,” Levi repeats, and his heart crawls its way up his windpipe to sit against the back of his tongue. He thinks that he might throw up, thinks he feels something clotting in his mouth, thinks the Force is smothering him. “I asked you to marry me.”

(“ _jedi don’t get married_ ,” Ymir had said, her image distorted by who knows how many HoloNet relays between Coruscant and her. She had looked so different in the glittering blue of the holoimage in comparison to the first time he’d seen her on Mandalore two years prior, bedecked in gold armour beside her wife. Eren had endeared himself to them instantly. Levi had taken considerably more time to like. “ _or believe in having any kind of feelings. unless something has changed over yonder?_ ”

“ _you’re right. they don’t_ ,” Levi had told her, hiding his hands in the sleeves of his robe even though he knew she couldn’t see them. It was a habit he’d picked up from Eren, somewhere. He couldn’t remember precisely when. “ _that’s why i’m asking for your help_.”

She’d paused. The freckles on her cheeks had looked like small bursts of static. “ _you’re lucky we like you._ ” A breath—and then she’d said, “ _what, exactly, do you need?_ ”)

“You—what?” There’s a part of him that’s trying to backpedal even as Eren searches for the words that are probably running around inside his head right now. “I—when?”

Levi has never considered himself particularly impulsive. Tactless, occasionally. Socially unaware, maybe. But he’s never done something like this before, coughing up questions and asking them without ever really running them through his brain first to get approval. It’s something he’s always left up to Eren, allowing him to stumble through conversations until all his thoughts _click_ together, like they always do.

His own thoughts aren’t clicking together in the way he’d thought they were supposed to.

“I did,” Levi says, and his voice doesn’t shake when he does. He prides himself on that, and he thinks he should. After all, he’s had a lot of practice. “On Chalacta. I had assumed you said—I assumed that the kiss was—“ he stops, waiting for his tongue to catch up with the rest of him, hoping for something else to say that might give indication as to where, exactly, he’d gone wrong.

Nothing comes along to save him, and he wishes his tongue had had the presence of mind to stay still before it had asked about Mandalore.

“Chalacta?” Eren brings his fingers to his mouth, his eyes dropping to the marble floor as his eyebrows furrow further. The green of his irises breaks apart the sunlight outside, leaving droplets of gold on his eyelashes. It makes Levi’s heart squeeze.

(He can’t believe that he’s messed this up so quickly. There’d been this space in him for so long, and it had been _filled_ , and now all that Levi can see in the immediate future is the hole’s return, yawning wide and desperate and aching.

He doesn’t know if he can handle that—reaching for Eren and having him slip through his fingers all over again.)

“Yes,” sandpaper tears against the line of his throat. “On Chalacta.”

“You...” Eren watches him, the Force alive with the riot of emotions curling around his body, and Levi can feel him everywhere. But that is hardly anything new. “You didn’t _ask_ me to marry you.”

Eren’s expressions have always been just a little bit contagious, and right now is no different. A frown is pulling at his own mouth, the Force threatening to pull him under with all of Eren’s questions.

“I did. It was right after our assignment had been handled. You looked—“ Levi blinks and the words stop again. There’s no real description for how Eren had looked in the forest. The humidity had made the hair damp at his temples and the heat had brought deeper colour to his cheeks. His lips had stretched into a smile and Levi’s stomach had dropped, and his eyes had been brighter than all the foliage that had surrounded them. He’d been— “perfect,” he finishes, his voice dropping to a whisper without his permission.

Eren’s cheeks go dark, the excuse of jungle heat beyond them now, and his eyes flicker back and forth across the speckled marble, chasing potential constellations there.

“You didn’t _ask_ me anything,” Eren says after a pause that feels like it’ll stretch into forever, a piece of cloth pulling as tight as it can before it tears down the middle. “What you said was ‘I wanna marry you.’ That’s not—“ his lips twist and he swallows, meeting Levi’s eyes. It’s like looking at a world covered by _life_ , bountiful and endless. “Just because you _want_ something doesn’t mean you intend to ask for it.”

(He says that so softly that it feels like a confession. It feels like an admission of guilt.

It feels like he’s speaking from experience, and the Force ripples as if a stone had been dropped inside it.

And Levi thinks of the undercity. Thinks of Eren and of himself. Thinks.)

All of this—the balance of the universe, the sunlight right now and it’s adoration of the lines of Eren’s face, Levi’s racing heart and sweating palms—has been a long time coming. This moment and every single one before it have been _years_ in the making, and now that there’s no dam to keep everything in place, Levi can’t _stop_. Or, maybe that isn’t right. Maybe he just doesn’t _want_ to.

The two of them, he thinks, just need to stop being afraid of _wanting_ things.

“You’re right. I didn’t ask you anything,” is what Levi says, then. He rolls his next words on his tongue to become familiar with their texture, deliberating in the way he’s always tried to do when he has something important to say. “So I’ll rephrase: will you marry me?” This question doesn’t surprise him when it falls from his lips, for all that it seems to surprise Eren.

“I—what?” It’s a lot like watching a holoimage flicker between clarity and static as different emotions fight for control on his face. The space between them chills as Eren tries to pull himself closer to his body, attempting to hide in the Force while he thinks. “What?”

“You said I didn’t ask. You’re right. I _want_ to marry you, so now I’m asking.” The inside of his mouth feels filled with cotton while the rest of him feels fragile enough to break into pieces if he were to move too quickly. But he stays in place, leaning back in his chair to wait. He’s gotten very good at waiting, even if he doesn’t particularly like it very much.

Eren’s jaw works around the words he wants to say as he chews them over, his lips thinning around them.

But the only thing that he asks is, “why?”

Levi blinks. “What?”

“Why?” The Force tickles the inside of his sinuses, making his nose wrinkle as Eren rocks back on his heels, a nervous gesture that Levi hasn’t seen since he’d been fresh from his Trials. “I mean—why do you want to marry me? Or... get married. Or... why?”

When Levi licks his lips they feel more chapped than they had when he’d entered the Archives that morning. He doesn’t know if it’s his nerves or if they really are drier now.

“I just mean, uh,” Eren lifts his hand to rub at the back of his own neck nervously, the gesture looking stiff and unnatural. “I—this isn’t something you have to—I’m happy.” He swallows, as if around a stone lodged in his throat, and Levi finds that there’s one in his own when he tries to mime him. “I’m happy with what we’ve got. I never thought that we’d even _be_ here, and—“ he blinks and his eyelashes scatter the light when he does. “I’m _happy_.”

There are digging fingers rooting around in his chest, grabbing at his lungs. It makes it hard to breathe. “I _want_ to marry you. I don’t feel like I—Eren, I have never felt like I _have_ to be with you. You’ve never twisted my arm to be—I want to be here, with you. I _love_ you. It’s okay if you don’t want to get married, but I—“

“That’s _not_ what I said—“

There’s a loud _shhh!_ From somewhere in the Archives, pushed forward to be amplified by the Force, and Levi lowers his voice when he speaks next.

“Then why are we _fighting_?”

“We’re not _fighting_ ,” Eren’s skin looks pulled too-tightly over his bones, panic washing out the colour in his face. “We’re not fighting, I’m just _confused_. I love you. I’ve always—“ he pauses, swallows, and chews on his words once more. And then, “Jedi don’t get married.”

“I know,” Levi says, after a moment, pushing himself up from the chair to take a couple slow steps forward, giving Eren the opportunity to back away if he chose to. He stays where he is, even as Levi takes one step further into his space. “But Jedi don’t do any of what we do. And I want to _marry_ you. I want to wear a ring. I want to give _you_ a ring. I want people to see me marry you.” The colour rises back into Eren’s cheeks so quickly that Levi wonders if he’d imagined the pallor before. “I can’t stop thinking about marrying you.”

They’re close enough that when Eren exhales sharply, Levi can feel it ghost across his face. “I want to marry you,” Eren says, and there’s something going on inside his expression that Levi doesn’t know how to label, can’t even find the words to try when Eren lifts his hand to brush his knuckles against Levi’s cheek. “I want to marry you.”

“Okay,” Levi almost whispers, his words sticky with emotion as they crawl from his mouth. “So, just to clarify: will you marry me?”

The Force shifts around them and Eren kisses him, hard, sweeping Levi into his arms. It’s something he doesn’t do that often, certainly not where people could _see_ , absolutely not where someone would think to shame them both for this display. But he does it now, and Levi finds himself placed upon the table, Eren between his legs.

And Levi holds onto him. With both hands.

“ _Yes,_ ” is hissed against his lips before kisses are peppered all over his face, leaving burning marks against his cheeks, his forehead, his eyelids. “Yes. I’ll marry you. I’ll marry you whenever you want. I’ll marry you more than once. _Yes_. I want to marry you.”

Every knot inside his body unwinds at once, the tension from before draining into the floor beneath the table. He pulls Eren against him in the Force so tightly that when he breathes, Levi can feel the sensation inside his own chest.

And it barely even registers when a Chadra-Fan padawan backpedals almost as fast as she’d rounded the corner, squeaking an apology.

Levi reminds himself to speak with her. Some other time.

(Later, a nightmare will wake Eren with a start and a gasp, his body trembling against the sheets as his fingers fumble for Levi’s own. He’ll squeeze hard enough to hurt and his eyes will shimmer in the darkness—bright and beautiful and green.

“ _i dream about omwat,_ ” Eren will say, his voice tight with whatever he’d seen behind his eyelids.

“ _i’d thought so,_ ” Levi will reply, squeezing Eren’s fingers in return when he loosens his grip enough for him to do so.

Eren will pause and watch Levi’s face, searching for something that Levi thinks he understands.

“ _are you sure you want to marry me?_ ” He will finally ask. His hand will be trembling in Levi’s own.

Levi will curl closer, will bring their noses close, will brush them together and speak against Eren’s lips, even though his own are still chapped. “ _the only thing i’m more sure of, in the whole universe, is how much i fucking love you._ ”

Eren’s exhale will shudder and his eyes will screw themselves shut. “ _okay_ ,” he will say, and his words will shake. “ _okay_.” He will pause and try to compose himself, and he will fail. Levi will find himself trying and failing to do the same when Eren says, “ _i’m sure, too._ ”

Levi will kiss him. Eren will kiss him back.

And the universe will sigh with relief.)


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Sorry,” Eren says, just this side of breathless, and he’s warm enough that his apology coalesces on a sigh of white, just as predictable as the fact that Levi’s breath doesn’t. “I thought I was going to faint.” His voice lowers and Levi breathes in his presence in the Force, can feel it start to warm him from the center of his chest outward. His toes curl with the feeling. “I couldn’t fucking believe this was happening.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> death comes for us all, and it's in the form of a wedding.

(Levi can’t say that he ever expected to get married in a bar in the Mandalorian capital. He also can’t say that he expected to ever really be on this planet again, with the winter chill biting at his cheeks, looking down over the railing of a second story balcony, watching pedestrians watch him.

Then again, he supposes, he can’t say he ever really expected to get married at all.)

“He’ll be out in a minute.” Ymir’s voice behind him doesn’t make him jump. He’d felt her coming in his periphery, though her bootsteps had been silent against the wooden floor beneath their feet. He’d been keeping his own presence in the Force in check, holding it close to the center of his body, resisting the temptation to check in on Eren, to reach out and touch him, so close by. “It’s the nerves.”

“Yeah,” Levi tells her, turning around to lean against the railing, a solid support against his lower back to keep him upright. “He was looking a little green in the face.”

His words had stopped coming out on white clouds only moments ago. It’s not a surprise—his body temperature has always adapted quickly this way. It’s something he’d known years ago as he’d watched the winter sun cut through the fog of Eren’s voice, scattering against it as if it were a physical thing in its way.

Ymir’s gold armour makes no sound when she takes a place beside him, resting her own weight against the railing. It doesn’t show any signs that there are two people leaning against it at all.

“He’s worried he’ll ruin it.” Ymir wipes at her nose when she speaks, watching the small collection of witnesses—of friends—gathered together for this, speaking softly in little groups before making slow rounds, breaking down label of _stranger_. “That this’ll be the biggest regret of your life and he’ll be the one that cocked it all up.”

Levi swallows, trying to dislodge his heart from his throat and force it back into his chest where it belongs. It doesn’t cooperate.

“Interesting assessment. Did the Order miss you when it was snooping through this system? Have you got a Force sensitivity you didn’t tell anyone about?”

It’s a rare thing when Ymir ignores a barb like that, rarer still that she presses on with the subject. “It doesn’t take a Jedi to see what’s on that kid’s face.” A pause, and her eyes drift toward her wife, the deep red of her armour contrasting with the soft pink sitting on her cheeks, brought on by the cold. “I was like that. On my wedding day.” She speaks softly, her words dropping from her mouth like falling snow. She dusts the floorboards with them. “She wanted a wedding, like you. I was sure I was going to fucking puke, but I didn’t. My voice shook the whole time.”

“I didn’t take you for a romantic,” Levi says. He keeps his eyes forward, fixing them on the door that leads inside, where Eren is soothing his nerves. Jean had followed him.

“That’s funny.” Her own gaze doesn’t stray from Christa’s face as she speaks to Eren’s friends. She’s holding Mikasa’s attention impressively. “I didn’t take you for one either.”

Silence settles, punctuated by the soft murmurs of the others, by Hanji’s howl of laughter at something or other that Mike had said, by the sounds of the bar, busy below them. He pulls his robes tighter around himself.

(“ _how’s it feel to hit the mat, master levi?_ ” Eren had been standing over him, his padawan braid newly cut, his chest heaving with the effort of an almost-perfectly executed sparring match. His cheeks had been flushed high, his lightsaber held in a guard at his back. It was something he’d learned from Levi, and he’d been able to see it, even from where he’d been laid on his back.

“ _pretty good,_ ” he’d replied, catching his own breath in even inhales. “ _i’ve never had my assed kicked quite like that before. good job._ ”

It had been a slow thing, like a sunrise. The smile split Eren’s face, teeth white against the brown of his skin, and his eyes had been _bright_ , so bright, as if there’d been a light inside him, flickered on by whatever it was that Levi had said that had overjoyed him so.

In the Force, he’d felt like a star coming to life, barely contained inside the limits of his body.

Levi had felt Eren’s smile like a kick in the teeth. And that was the moment he’d been done for.)

Levi turns his head, just a little, to make it easier to lower his voice when he chooses what he wants to say. Questions sit on his tongue, heavy and thick. He wants to know if Ymir wonders if she’s good enough, if she wonders about other things that Christa may have wanted more than a wedding, if she wonders how much she’ll be able to give her over the course of their lives together. He has no idea how to phrase any of those questions without sounding like a child, and the weight of them threatens to shove them back down his throat to choke him.

One of Eren’s guests saves him from having to cough them up from behind his teeth as the man makes his way across the balcony, a woman trailing behind him, her brown hair pulled into a tail at the back of her head. Her ears are pink, unused to temperatures like this. Neither of them look any older than Eren.

Levi can see tears in the man’s eyes when he gets closer, can see tracks upon his dark skin where some had already fallen.

“I’m _really_ happy for you,” is what he says, his voice shaking only a little with whatever-it-is that’s going on upon his face. Levi can practically _feel_ Ymir’s eyebrows arching in the Force, and he doesn’t need to glance back at her face to know that he’s right. “Like, really happy.”

The person before him feels _loud_ —a chatterbox inside the Force, never silent, a constant conversation between the different parts of himself, or something like that.

“Thanks,” Levi replies, unsure of how, exactly, to handle this kind of emotion _before_ the whole... thing. He’d assumed that the crying business was something that would occur _afterward_. That’s how general information had made it sound, at any rate. And so he changes the subject entirely. “How do you know Eren? I don’t think we’ve met.”

The man sniffles with his whole body, and Levi can’t tell if it’s because of the tears or the cold. The woman behind him, smiles softly, as if this isn’t a new occurrence for them.

“We met in prison,” the man says, clearing his throat around the words waiting around in there. It might be that he’s trying to put them in their proper order. Levi can feel his own curiosity curling inside his stomach, tight and heavy. “I’m Connie Springer. I was, like, _the_ guard on his rotation for a while. I don’t work there anymore, because the Underworld Police took me, but at the _time_ , I was with Eren.” He takes a breath, and Ymir huffs out a breath beside him, as if she can see the long-winded nature of this explanation coming, and Levi has half a mind to tell her to shut up in advance.

This is a part of Eren Levi never got to see, a part that Eren doesn’t even _talk_ about, right in front of him. All Levi has to do is parse out the pieces of information he needs.

Connie continues, unbothered: “See, he was a high-risk inmate at the time, right, so he wasn’t allowed to go out for his hour of exercise with everyone else, because everyone was _sure_ it would result in violence, or something, and no one had ever seen a Jedi in _prison_ before, so I took him out to the yard and he would just walk around and talk about _you_.”

When Levi blinks, his eyes sting. He hadn’t realised how dry they were, how much the cold was affecting him. It makes the warmth rising up into his cheeks feel more obvious, more noticeable.

“I’d ask him, a lot of the time. About you. And he liked talking about you, even if what he said was always so _sad_. I didn’t expect him to come by CSF Headquarters, after everything that happened, because usually he just sends a message or something when he wants to catch up, but he stopped by and asked if I wanted to go to a wedding, and I asked whose, and he said his own, and—“

Fresh tears well up in his eyes, fat and ready to spill. The woman behind him steps forward to bring herself in even standing with Connie, speaking as he attempts to wipe at his eyes.

“He called me crying,” the woman says, her soft smile still curling her lips. Dimples rise in both her cheeks as she holds out her hand in an offer. Levi takes it, shaking it once before tucking his hands back inside his sleeves. Gloves might’ve been a wise choice, if he’d thought about them before they’d left. But he’d been a little scattered, maybe, in a way he almost never is, and it had been a wonder that he’d remembered to bring the heavier robes at all. “I’m Sasha,” she explains, folding her hands back in front of her. “I’m his plus one.”

“He _asked_ about her,” Connie sounds awestruck, when he says that. “Eren asked about her. He was so—I’m _really happy_ for you. He’s a good—“ Tears, again. Levi thinks that , by this point, he can relate. “He’s a good kid.”

Sasha laughs, good humour colouring the skin beneath her dimples.

(“ _are you sure you want to marry me?_ ” Eren had said, holding onto Levi’s hand like a lifeline, his knuckles white with everything that had played in a loop behind his eyelids. He’d been breathless and he’d been afraid, and his voice had been the whisper of dewdrops on grass.

Levi wonders if Eren had told Connie about Omwat, wonders if he told him about his dreams. Wonders what it was, exactly, that Eren had said about him, even at his lowest point, when he’d been pushing everyone away.

He wonders a lot of things.)

Something else saves Levi from having to put together the exact questions he needs to thoroughly pry, and his heart finally does drop from his throat to land in his stomach as the door to the balcony opens wide. Sasha tugs Connie to the side and out of the way as Eren takes strides long enough to eat the distance across the deck in a heartbeat, leaving Jean to roll his eyes dramatically as he rejoins Armin and Mikasa by the door. A more lively colour has risen into Eren’s cheeks, though there’s still a nervous tension tucked in the line of his lips.

“Sorry,” Eren says, just this side of breathless, and he’s warm enough that his apology coalesces on a sigh of white, just as predictable as the fact that Levi’s breath doesn’t. “I thought I was going to faint.” His voice lowers and Levi breathes in his presence in the Force, can feel it start to warm him from the center of his chest outward. His toes curl with the feeling. “I couldn’t fucking believe this was happening.”

“Yeah,” Levi speaks softly, because otherwise he knows his voice will shake. “I know _exactly_ what you mean.”

Ymir sniffs beside him, pushing away from the deck’s railing in one fluid motion, keeping her arms crossed over her chest. “Nothing’s _happened_ yet. Are you ready to actually get married, or are you gonna daydream about it for another age?”

Embarrassment shows itself on Eren’s face, but he doesn’t drop his gaze when he looks at her, and it’s a reminder of one of the reasons the Mandalorians had had such a fondness for him, years before. And his eyes—they fucking _sparkle_ , a deep and unwavering green, and Levi feels his own knees go a little weak. It’s tempting to lock _himself_ on the other side of the door as everything hits him at once, and it’s making his skin itch.

He ignores it, pulling Eren around him in the Force like a blanket, coaxing warmth into his fingertips.

Ymir breaks up the soft murmurs still dancing around in the chill around them when she claps her hands together, and the air crystalizes with the unified attention of everyone. Eren vibrates in the Force beside him, his shoulders stiff, the line of his body tense with barely contained energy.

“Who’s ready for a wedding?” Ymir asks, a smile splitting her face wide, her own enthusiasm crawling into the Force around her, pushing its way across the floorboards with reaching tendrils.

Connie hollers, falling into one of two lines on either side of Ymir at the end of the balcony. He’s joined by a couple voices from below, strangers either drunk of their asses or just as excited about the celebration as the party themselves. It kickstarts Levi’s heart, still in his stomach, and it makes his head swim.

“Alright, kiddos, come upfront.”

Eren moves first, his legs just as tense as his shoulders as he walks. Levi follows, half a step behind him, and they stand across from each other, Ymir one step backward between them.

Levi _knows_ that everyone else is lined up on either side, denoting the path that they had taken to walk up here, a minimalist sort of aisle, so common in human weddings.  And even though he knows this, even though that he’s entirely aware of them in his peripheral vision and in the Force, it’s almost like they’re not there at all. Eren’s eyes are on his face and there’s something tingling beneath his skin, dragging itself against his bones.

When Ymir speaks, it sounds like it’s from far away. “Got any vows before we do the whole Mando thing?”

There are—Levi has _so_ many things that he wants to say. He’s been thinking about this since—since Chalacta, since probably before that. He’s been wondering what would be best, what he could say that would explain just what it is that Levi feels _every time_ he sees Eren. Every time.

He parts his lips to speak. Winter sits on his tongue, dries out his mouth.

But Eren says, “I’ve got something,” before Levi can coax the words from where they’re lodged in his throat. “That I wanna say, I mean.”

Ymir nods, arching an eyebrow, and everything _feels_ so quiet, even though there are people in the bar just through the doorway. Even though there are people in the street below them. Even though there are people _right beside him_.

But Eren doesn’t feel that way. Quiet, that is. He’s spent his whole life swinging from the rumble of distant thunder to the rushing of wind, just beside his ears, and right now there’s nothing else that Levi can hear that _matters_.

“I, uh.” Eren’s hands are tugging at his own sleeves, rubbing the thick winter fabric between the thumb and forefinger of one hand. “I know that there are parts of me that’re unloveable.” He places the words carefully, as if dropping them into Levi’s hands, even as they sink in, even as Levi _hears_ them, and recoils.

“Ex _cuse_ —“

“No, I called first dibs, give me a second.” Eren’s eyes glitter, and the cold drags itself against his cheeks, and he’s _beautiful_. Levi shuts his mouth. “I know that there’re parts of me that’re unloveable. I’m... reckless. And I don’t follow directions. And I always, _always_ , always let my emotions get the better of me.”

There’s a furrow between Eren’s eyebrows. It takes more self-control than Levi had thought he possessed not to smooth it away with his thumb.

“But when—um.” Eren drops his eyes for a split-second before they find their way back to Levi’s face, and his heart is starting to crawl up and out of his stomach. “When you look at me, I feel _so_ —“ His eyelids flutter when he blinks, his cheeks going dark with _feeling_. “I _feel_ loveable. I feel loveable, and I—I _like_ feeling that way. I like who I am when I’m with you. I—“ His cheeks go darker still, his eyes flickering back and forth across Levi’s face. “I love you so fucking much, and there’s no better feeling than that.”

Sniffling starts, softly. It’s probably Connie—but Levi doesn’t turn his head to check, and neither does Eren.

 And every word that Levi had wanted to say has evaporated.

(“ _what does the force say about me?_ ” Breathed against his lips, warming them. The Force had, all at once, been soft with planet-life and loud with _Eren_.)

“I had so much shit that I was going to tell you,” Levi says, his voice coming out on a cloud of white, his heart racing enough to warm him from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet. “I had _so much_ , but then you talk, and you look like you do, and all I can find myself wanting to say is ‘I love you.’” His throat feels tight and when he speaks again, his voice is _trembling_. “I fucking—I _love_ you. I love you. I love you _so_ —“ He stops, clears his throat, and waits for his body to get back under control.

Eren is reaching out across the small distance between them in the Force, wrapping around Levi, breathing in, and his eyes are shimmering. Levi watches him swallow so as not to cry.

Another set of sniffles as started down the small aisle of people.

Levi finds it in himself to continue, “There’s not a _single_ day that I’ve been in love with you that I’ve found you unloveable.” Eren flinches. The whole reaction shifts upon his face. “You wanted to know what the Force said about you, the first time we came to this backwater-nowhere world, and I gave you a bullshit answer. But you wanna know what it says?” Ymir is standing between them, her eyes flickering, unhurried, between both of them. “It says you’re the best fucking thing to ever happen to me. It says I’ll never find anyone else like you. It says that this—all of this, everything that’s happened, this whole _thing_ —is the right thing to do.”

A gemstone falls from the corner of Eren’s eye and crawls its way down his cheek.

“I love you,” Levi says. “I don’t know how to say it better.”

It’s silent, again, for a moment, before Ymir clears her throat. There’s a soft, almost unnoticeable tremor when she speaks, “now for the scripted part. It’s gonna be in Basic, and edited for your Jedi sensibilities.”

Eren’s lips twitch a little in a smile. “Okay.”

“Take each other’s forearms.”

Eren offers out his hand and Levi takes it, clasping his arm at his elbow and squeezing gently. Eren squeezes back.

“And repeat after me.” She clears her throat again and her eyes find Christa, standing to Eren’s right. “‘We are one when we’re together or apart. We will share everything. We are warriors, bound in soul and body.’”

They repeat it back, in perfect unison. Their hands are shaking, even as they hold onto each other tightly.

“Okay,” Ymir opens her hands, palms out, and says, “time to exchange the rings.”

Levi lets Eren’s arm go to fish in his pocket, pulling out the two rings, wrapped in rough, dark cloth. When Eren’s eyes find them, his eyebrows rise, and he glances back at Levi’s face.

He should’ve known Eren would recognise the fabric cut from one of his old robes. But he unwraps it anyway, tucking the cloth back into his pocket, and offers out one of the rings to Eren. Their fingers brush when he takes it, and the touch races up his arm with an electric feeling.

It’s a dark metal, sized perfectly for Levi’s finger, just as the one still in Levi’s hand was made for Eren’s. It catches the weak sunlight, glinting softly, and he slips the ring onto Eren’s left hand. Eren’s hand is still shaking when he does the same for Levi, dragging his thumb over the metal reverently, breathing out a sound on a cloud of white.

“Stop making _eyes_ ,” Ymir huffs, wiping at her nose. “I now pronounce you wedded Jedi apostates. _Husbands_. Kiss, already. _Go_.”

Eren’s hands are _warm_ when he takes Levi’s face between them, bringing their mouths together in a careful kiss. His lips—as they always are, as they have been since their first—are chapped when they move over Levi’s in a gesture of admiration. It makes the kiss _perfect_ , makes it seem like an addition to their history, makes it seem as if this is exactly where they’d left off before.

Levi clutches at Eren’s robes, his knuckles going white with the effort, and they break apart breathless. Embarrassing, maybe, from a single kiss. But Levi can’t stop smiling.

“Time to get shitfaced!” Ymir announces, and there’s laughter hiding away inside the words as she says them. “We’ve got a wedding to celebrate!”

The cheer she gets is _loud_ , and even Nile looks like he’s wiping at one eye with his palm, and there’s a giddiness beneath Levi’s ribs that’s making it hard to _breathe_.

Levi looks up at Eren’s face when he finds their fingers laced together. A snowflake flutters, catching in his hair, and there’s never been anything so beautiful. There’s never been _anyone_ so beautiful.

“You okay?” Eren asks him when Levi can’t seem to find the words to get this picture right.

“Better,” He replies with no hesitation, and he pulls Eren into another kiss, like he’d wanted to after their first one, like he’s going to as long as they’re together, like he plans to do for the rest of their lives.

(The Force sings around them, rushing past his ears.

And everything feels miraculous, just then. Everything.)

-

They leave footprints in the snow behind them.

Keldabe is nothing more than a distant blur on the gray horizon, partially obscured by the slow but steady snowfall and the woodland between here and there. When Eren turns on the porch of the ranch house, bathed in the soft halo of a lit glowstrip, he looks past the shape of their speeder cooling off in the almost-silent evening, and he thinks he can still see the glitter of the capital’s lights. But that could just be his imagination.

Levi is a warmth beside him, humming quietly in the Force, both their fingers tightly laced together.

(“ _what are you doing?_ ” Levi had leaned against him, the noise of the bar and their friends louder in the enclosed space than they had been outside. Everyone around them had wobbled in the Force, the whole room swaying with it, and Eren had been almost certain that the two of them were the only ones sober.

It turns out that Nile Dawk, Captain of the Coruscant Security Force himself, knew an abnormal amount of drinking songs from an abnormal amount of worlds.

“ _carving our names into a wooden table. you’re always talking about shit that normal couples do._ ” Levi had laughed at him, had planted a kiss on his cheek as Eren drove the tip of a vibroblade against the scarred wood of a corner booth’s table.

“ _do you even know what year it is on coruscant right now?_ ”

“ _no_ ,” Eren had replied, his right hand going still, the vibroblade a weight within it, and his eyes had fallen on his left hand, splayed across the wood for balance. “ _but you probably do._ ”

Levi had taken the blade and pushed him closer toward the wall, taking over the business of immortalizing their presence in this bar on this day. Eren had lifted his eyes and watched Levi’s left hand, and he’d been unable to look away.

Even in the dim light of the bar, their wedding rings had seemed to sparkle.)

It’s homey inside the ranch house, all polished wood and ambient lighting once Eren’s fingers find the panel on the wall to bring the place to life. The chill from outside is chased away by the warm air as the two of them shed their boots by the heavy front door. It smells like citroot and Mandalorian mountain pine, but only barely, and only when Eren breathes out does he know it’s there.

“This is a sweet layout,” Eren says, folding his outer robe over one of his arms as he walks slowly through the living room. Even the furniture is made of polished wood, cushions placed artfully on every sitting surface, giving everything an archaic feeling that isn’t really present on a whole lot of other worlds, where automatic doors and chrome finish is more common.

A few of the room’s cushions sit on the floor in front of a stone fireplace, glowing with embers. He pauses in the center of the room, watching the ghost of a fire he’d never seen flicker as he continues, “it was nice of Ymir to loan us her house.”

“One of her houses,” Levi corrects him, moving to stand beside him, his own outer robe still hanging upon his shoulders. “It’s not one she uses that much, or something. Can you imagine having enough houses to just _loan_ one out? And to preface the loan with ‘we don’t really live in this one’?” He scoffs, even though a smile is sitting on his lips.

Eren tuts softly, trying to calm the fluttering of his heart inside his chest. They’re _alone_ for the first time all day, and they’re—they’re—“Coveting that which someone else has. It’s no wonder I turned out to be such a bad Jedi.”

Levi shoves him gently. “You’re on a roll today.” Something in Levi’s voice catches at the end of his sentence, something quiet but most certainly there. And then he says, “husband.”

Eren’s cheeks catch fire and he shuts his eyes. The house is empty around them, and it feels that way in the Force. But Levi’s presence is crawling across the floorboards and the walls already and it’s clogging Eren’s nostrils, making him lightheaded. His ears are ringing— _husband_ Levi had said—and every single fucking feeling from earlier is coming back and multiplying itself, filling him up so that his skin feels pulled tight over his bones.

(“ _he’s going to wish he never married me,_ ” Eren had said, and his whole body had been shaking. He could barely hear Jean’s loud and put-upon sigh over the nonstop ringing in his ears. “ _i’m going to fuck up the vows, or our_ marriage _, and he’s going to realize this was the worst mistake of his life._ ”

“ _eren,_ ” Jean had chosen his words very carefully, each one sharply enunciated, “ _shut the fuck up. levi, bless his fucking heart, was disgustingly obvious about his feelings for you starting the instant you ended up off-world. if there’s anything he’s going to feel regret about, it’s going to be that he didn’t marry you sooner._ ”

“ _you’re full of shit,_ ” Eren had told him, the music from the bar vibrating through the floor beneath his boots.

“ _you’re just mad when i’m right about things._ ”

“ _i should never’ve invited you_.”

Jean had laughed at that. Loudly. “ _and, what, you’d be standing in here all by yourself when you should be out there all gross and married? please_.”

Eren had almost shoved him. The only thing stopping him had been the feeling that he was going to faint.)

“Husband,” Eren repeats, and he lifts his eyes from the embers to glance over Levi’s face, heat still sitting in his cheeks.

“Yeah.” Levi swallows, his eyes flickering to the floor and back to Eren’s face. He lifts his hand and offers it out, palm up. “Shall we?”

Eren takes his offer, even though his hand is shaking. It feels like it’s been shaking since he’d stepped out onto the deck of the bar back in Keldabe. It feels like it’s been shaking since Omwat. Maybe since their first time on Mandalore. Maybe before that.

Levi tugs him, their feet silent against the floorboards as they follow the steady glow of lit wall sconces, their lightbulbs tinted orange. A hallway branches to the right, opposite the kitchen, and Levi takes it, stopping outside a hinged door left ajar, the doorframe carved with the faces of Mandalorian wildlife, featuring the teeth of many creatures that Eren can only recognize by sight, none of their names having ever been taught in the Basic language.

“Is this...” Levi trails off, the Force around him going brittle, chilling the surface of Eren’s skin. “Is this okay? Or...”

There’s a bedroom on the other side of the door. Eren can see it when the light cuts across the floor, revealing more hardwood floor and a plush rug. Their travel bags are barely visible in the shadows, tucked away by a bedside table. He glances back at Levi’s face and eyes like stormclouds are ghosting over his own cheeks, Levi’s mouth pressed into a thin line by his nerves.

And Eren shifts his robe, still draped over his free arm, before he tugs Levi close. A surprised sound, almost like a laugh, bursts against the side of Eren’s face, shifting almost instantly into a shout as he unlaces their fingers to support Levi’s back with his right arm, hooking Levi’s legs with his left as he lifts him into a cradled-carry.

“What the _fuck_ are you doing?” A breathless question as Eren steps over the threshold, elbowing a panel on the wall to bring the details of the room into focus beneath more gentle orange light.

“This is a thing,” Eren tells him, just as breathless, and he thinks he can feel the barely contained giddiness tickling the back of his tongue. “I read about it. Technically, it’s supposed to be over the threshold of... your house? Or something. But this is—I forgot, at the door, and uh. I thought this was good, too. Or acceptable.”

When Levi nuzzles the side of Eren’s face, it’s gentle enough to make his legs threaten to give out.

“This is good. And it _is_ a thing.” Levi snorts, softly, and wiggles in Eren’s arms. “I’d probably only be able to get you over my shoulders. Not as good for setting a mood, huh?”

“I don’t know,” he says, setting Levi down, letting go only when his feet are firmly on the floor. Levi takes Eren’s outermost robe with him, rolling it over his arms and tossing it across the wide expanse of the bed where it disappears on the other wise. Eren pays it little attention. “I’ve probably been carried in less good ways.”

Another snort as Levi shrugs out of his own robe, throwing it in the same direction, though his eyes don’t leave Eren’s face. Something begins racing in his pulse, the moment stretching out between them, becoming heavy and thick as Levi reaches across the barely-there space that separates them to undo the belt at Eren’s waist with practiced ease.

It falls to the rug beneath them with a summarily ignored _thud_.

And Eren’s entire body jumpstarts.

His own hands find the belt at Levi’s waist, one of the staples of Jedi wear, and it falls beside Eren’s before Levi begins to back him slowly toward the bed, already tugging at the wrapping patterns of the inner robework and tunic. It had been symbolic, had meant something to get married in the clothes of the Order that didn’t believe in this sort of thing. It’s symbolic now as fabric falls away beneath Levi’s hands, as Eren’s own work at the immaculate wrapping around Levi’s waist.

It’s a shedding of ghosts.

The back of Eren’s calves hit the short footboard of the bed before he falls onto the mattress, one of Levi’s hands pressed to the bare skin of Eren’s sternum, fingers spread wide. He wonders if Levi can feel the way his heart is trying to scramble out of his chest, to place itself it Levi’s palm where it feels like it belongs. But he doesn’t know how to ask that question when Levi’s looking at him like he is.

“This is okay?” Levi asks, again, one knee resting against the mattress, his other foot still pressed against the rug.

(They’ve not done anything quite like this before. The Force always begins to sing too loudly, threatens to give them away inside the Temple, and so they’ve only been able to leave the hints of lovebites against each other’s throats, tucked away like secrets against the hollows of their pulses.

This is something similar and altogether different. It’s something that Eren had never thought he would have.

And he doesn’t know how to ask for it, as important as it is.)

Eren kisses him and something inside him catches fire.

The kiss is a way to hide a “ _yes_ ” inside a murmur of sound, it’s a way to answer without having to _ask_ for anything, and it’s a way to finally, _finally_ open himself completely, with no one else around but them.

And the Force is _loud_. It rumbles around them, charged with anticipation—of this, of the wedding, of _them_ —muffled only when Levi draws his tongue against the seam of Eren’s lips to coax them open. Eren resists approximately not at all, parting his lips and tilting his head as Levi changes the angle of his own to lean into Eren’s touch as he reaches up to brush his fingers over Levi’s cheek.

Levi’s other knee comes up to the mattress, bracketing Eren’s hips for a moment as their tongues drag across each other slowly, breathless murmurs swallowed before they can reach the room’s walls. Levi pulls away from Eren’s mouth, a loss that he feels like a physical thing, to pepper softer kisses against the side of his face.

“Move back,” Levi tells him and Eren wiggles backward, shrugging off the rest of his tunic as Levi moves with him, until his backside hits pillows, fluffed against the headboard.

Levi’s weight settles on Eren’s lap, and the two of them exhale sharply. In that moment, Eren doesn’t know if he’s grateful for the looseness of Jedi clothes what with the way their hips are slotted together, their lengths barely touching in the softest of teases, or if he hates the fact that it’s not _near_ enough friction as a result.

But he _can_ tell that Levi is hard, can see a bright dusting of pink on his cheeks even in the shade of light the room’s bathed in. It makes his throat very dry to think about that.

With both his hands, Eren pushes the rest of Levi’s tunic from his shoulders, letting the cloth fall to cover his own shins. He can feel Levi’s breath hitch as he lets his hands wander, feels Levi’s fingers twitch against Eren’s bicep, feels the Force flicker with the feel of static.

And as Eren watches, the flush on Levi’s cheeks travels slowly down his chest.

“You’re beautiful,” Eren says, the sentiment pushed from his mouth on a desert breeze, the dryness of his throat making his tongue itch when he speaks. “Like—really beautiful.”

Lightning dances in Levi’s irises as he leans forward, pressing a kiss to Eren’s cheek without comment. Another follows it, creeping toward his mouth until there’s a kiss planted at one corner, one of Levi’s hands moving from Eren’s bicep to slide across his collarbone until his fingers are pressed against Eren’s jaw, tilting his head back slowly, gently.

Eren’s eyes are on the ceiling and it’s hard to breathe.

Levi drags his lips against the column of Eren’s throat, leaving a trail of tingling skin in its wake. He shudders, breathing out a soft “ _oh_ ” and it turns into a low, quiet moan when Levi’s teeth find his pulse and he leaves a bruise.

A matching one joins it on the other side of his neck and his fingers tighten against Levi’s shoulder. He shifts his legs, pushing up his hips almost reflexively, and Levi gasps against his throat, pushing back down, hard. Jedi clothes have always been rough, as unluxurious as possible, and the sensation is sending goosebumps up and down Eren’s body, curling his toes.

The Force has begun to shiver around them.

Another line of kisses trails from Eren’s pulse and down his sternum, all delicate like the flutter of insect wings with just a hint of teeth behind them. Levi’s grip upon his jaw keeps his gaze on the ceiling, and the wood above them is carved with a starchart of the Mandalorian summer sky.

It all goes out of focus when Levi takes one of Eren’s nipples into his mouth, dragging the flat of his tongue across it. He whimpers, his back arching from where it’s pressed against the pillows, his heels digging into the mattress. Levi rolls his hips in response, dragging their cocks together through their pants, letting Eren’s nipple go to groan, pressing his forehead against Eren’s sternum.

Levi’s breath is warm against the skin of his chest as he gathers himself, sitting back upright and letting go of Eren’s jaw to move down his body, _intent_ bleeding into the air around him, beading sweat at Eren’s temples.

“It’s really not fair that you can’t look at you,” Levi tells him, and there’s something in his voice that curls in Eren’s gut, makes him twitch beneath the waistband of his pants. “It’s really something spectacular.”

“Shut up,” Eren replies, unsure of where to put his hands, and so he touches everywhere he can reach. Brushes his fingers over the jut of Levi’s collarbone, drags his hands down the plane of Levi’s chest, savouring the feeling of goosebumps rising beneath his hands as he follows the flush from Levi’s throat to his navel. “What do you know?”

“I know a lot of things,” Levi says, nuzzling the skin above Eren’s bellybutton, though his eyes are fixed on Eren’s face. They’re dark, heavy with _something_ , and Eren licks his lips with a quick flick of his tongue. Levi watches that, too, as his fingers curl in the waistband of his pants. “Do you wanna see what I know?”

It’s a slow thing, what Levi’s doing. The way the fabric of his boxers soothes the roughness of the fabric of his pants. The way Levi drops both of those things to the side, over the edge of the bed. The way Levi spreads Eren’s legs to take a position between them, the way touches from the Force flutter over every inch of his skin. The way his pupils blow wide when he looks at Eren’s body, when he looks at his _cock_. It’s all _very_ slow.

And Eren _wants_ this. Wanted this wedding, wanted this night, wants the rest of this week to go just like this. Wants Levi, more than anything else. More than he’s ever wanted anything.

(The thought makes him recoil, a reflex born from the Order, from the sublevels, from the very center of his being. Wanting things has never ended well, has always been one of those forbidden pipedreams, has been the source of every _one_ of Eren’s problems since he’d seen the Coruscanti sky for the first time.

He doesn’t know how to want this without being _terrified_ that he’s going to break it.)

Levi’s hands smoothing up his thighs pulls Eren’s attention away from too long ago, brings back into focus Levi’s face and the armoire behind him, makes him remember _exactly_ where he is. Eren drops his eyes to Levi’s hands, notices the fingers tremble, watches the ring on his left hand catch the light and play with it.

Eren rests his right hand atop it.

“You were thinking too loudly,” Levi says, lacing their fingers as he strokes Eren in a slow, barely-there grip. It makes him dizzy.

“That’s why we never get sent on stealth assignments,” fuck, his voice is _trembling_ , and they haven’t—this is just— “It’s the _thinking_ that always gives me away.”

Levi tightens his fingers around Eren’s cock and Eren _hisses_ , his whole body jerks, his vision goes spotty. It’s _embarrassing_ , pathetic, and a shudder wracks him from the crown of his head to the base of his spine.

“It’s not the thinking that gives you away,” Levi speaks, layering everything he says in starsugar, slowing down his strokes. “It’s the fact that you’re not even a _little_ subtle that does it.” He tightens his fingers further on another upstroke and Eren feels it deep within him. “You don’t know what it’s like watching you, but I can see everything on your face right now.” It’s a breathless whisper, sprinkled over his skin like candle wax. “It’s incredible.”

He twitches in Levi’s hand, feels the smear of precome on another stroke—and then he stops.

“Wait here,” he says, and Eren drops onto the pillows with a groan that’s equal parts frustrated and _painfully_ turned on as Levi slides off the bed, heading toward their bags that Eren hasn’t looked at since before they’d walked into the room. Despite the obvious hardness in his pants, Levi manages to walk, unburdened.

He’s always been better at control than Eren has.

Levi crouches and Eren shuts his eyes, listening as clothes are moved within the bags, as things are shifted and turned around, as Levi takes deep, even breaths as he searches through their things. Force-touches are still brushing across Eren’s cheeks, over his chest, against the hairs on his navel, up and down his length. There are touches everywhere and nowhere, and when Eren reaches out for them, to lean into them, they only get bolder.

The mattress bends beneath Levi’s weight and Eren opens his eyes to find him back between his own legs.

And he is very, very naked.

“My patience has been rewarded.” Eren tries to pretend that he doesn’t speak with a croak, and the way Levi smiles tells him that he doesn’t seem to mind. It makes it a little bit easier to look at him, though it’s still exactly like looking directly into any of the millions suns on countless other worlds.

Laughter touches Levi’s voice when he says, “sure. Lift your hips.”

He complies, admiring the lines of Levi’s face as he slides a towel underneath Eren, feeling his mouth water when his eyes linger just a bit too long on Levi’s cock, just as strained as his own. Levi catches his gaze and holds it, the smile that lingers on his mouth this time much shaper, more mischievous.

But his hands haven’t stopped shaking, and he keeps biting at his lower lip, keeps soothing over the teeth marks with a swipe of his tongue.

Maybe he isn’t as in control as Eren had thought he was.

There’s a bottle with a gold-coloured cap in Levi’s hand, the liquid inside it clear. He turns it, over and over, curling and uncurling his fingers around it. He bites his lip, like he has been, and his hand is shaking as he holds the bottle, like it has been. It takes a moment for the bottle to stop its rotation, takes another moment more for Levi to spread the lube over his fingers and warm it with a back-and-forth motion of his thumb. In all these moments, Eren’s body never forgets where it is, never relaxes. It receives constant attention from the Force around him, gentle and fleeting, but _enough._

Eren tugs Levi forward by hooking one of his legs around him. Levi catches his own weight on the palm that isn’t covered with lube, and they’re almost eye-to-eye.

It makes it easy, then, to return Levi’s favour from before. Slow strokes with shaking fingers, enough to the point where Levi’s thighs begin to quiver, where lube drips, just a little, on his chest, where Levi’s free hand is held above it.

His eyes are closed, obscuring the cloud-covered sky, but his cheeks are flushed high and he makes small, breathless sounds above him, and Eren can feel the ghosts of his own fingers on Levi’s body singing into the Force.

And Eren speaks without thinking.

“You’re like the sun.”

Levi opens his eyes and his pupils are like black holes, swallowing light and stormclouds and Eren himself. Eren’s blood is scorching the underside of his skin when Levi looks at him like that. His whole body is _alive_ with that look. “What?” The question is slurred but recognizable. Eren can relate.

“The—you’re... like the sun,” Eren repeats. “It’s—you’re bright. So bright. Sometimes it was—looking at you is like looking at the sun. There’s _light_ , in the universe, and—“ Levi’s fingers are cold and slick as he trails them up the curve of Eren’s backside. His heels, once again, dig back into the mattress, his toes curling against the sheets.

“Is this okay?” Levi asks, _again_ , for the—for the too-many-th time. One of Levi’s fingers is poised against his entrance, and all of this is happening quickly, _so_ fast, but _this_ isn’t happening fast _enough_.

“ _Yes,_ ” Eren tells him. Levi’s finger is so close and every other part of them isn’t touching. He wishes that they would. “Yes, yeah, this is _okay_ , why do you—you keep asking?”

His index finger pushes into his body, a slow thing, and it stings. But, then, Eren had known it would. He’d checked the first time he’d left a lovebite on Levi’s throat, had wanted to learn every inch of him this way—and he’d wanted to be loved this way, too.

But it’s making his throat tight—all of this is making his throat tight.

Levi begins to speak, and it’s easier to focus when he does. “I want to get this right.” It has to be hard for him, holding himself up like he is, his other hand a finger deep in Eren’s _asshole_ , but that’s not the strain that’s in his voice. It’s something else, and Eren wants to kiss it out of his mouth before he finishes, but he can’t bring himself to move. “I want to get this right, because I’ve got a really bad habit of missing moments. I don’t—“ Levi exhales, sharply, when Eren tightens around his finger, but then—but then he says— “I don’t want you to feel unloveable.”

Eren pushes himself up, though his arm is weak support, but he uses his other to loop around Levi’s shoulder and bring him into a kiss. He’s aware, a little, of a second finger as he curves his own body to make this kiss easy on Levi, but the sting is dull, something easily pushed to the back of his head when Levi breathes a groan into his mouth like that.

Eren takes it as invitation to lick past his teeth, to tilt his head and suck on Levi’s tongue, press himself down on the two fingers already inside his body. Levi groans again, this time in a higher register, and his hand thrusts forward. It feels—different. Feels—

He pulls out of the kiss with a whine, holding their foreheads together even though he can feel the stretch in his neck.

“Okay?” Levi asks, will probably _keep asking_ , and Eren is so fucking in love he can—he can feel it in the marrow of his bones.

“ _Yes_ ,” Eren says, will _keep saying_ , “better than okay. Keep—another? I can—another.” Levi’s body twitches, a filthy sound clamped down behind his teeth even though he’s not—they’re still not—

Another finger, just as slow as the first two, and Levi doesn’t thrust his hand forward again. He lets them sit there, lets Eren fall back onto the pillows, keeps his body still until Eren rocks gently against his fingers.

Levi twists his wrist when he moves his hand. Push-and-pull, slow thrusts, and Eren rocks his hips to meet them, just as slow. If he focuses—if he _thinks,_ reaches out, breathes in—he can feel the tension in Levi’s arms as if it were happening in his own, wonders if Levi can feel what it’s like to have fingers in—to—

A press against—somewhere inside him. It happens again. A third time. Fourth. _Oh_. There’s a—Eren had made a—they’d _both_ made a sound, low and loud, hitting the wooden walls, bouncing off the glass of the curtained window, and Eren opens his eyes with the realization that he’d shut them.

And Levi’s watching him, having frozen.

He sees a lot of things on Levi’s face. There’s sweat at his temples, in the hollows of his collarbone. His thighs are still shaking. His lips are still wet from being kissed, still pink from where Eren had let his teeth adore them. There’s—it could be longing, the thing hanging on Levi’s features, the thing that’s parting Levi’s lips like that. It’s filling Eren’s own chest, and he’s getting dizzy again, and he can’t tell where his feelings are—where Levi’s are.

Eren swallows, shifts, watches Levi’s eyebrows furrow with a muffled curse.

“I can—if you—I’m ready. Please.” His own voice is coming from so far away, like it’s not coming from his body at all. “If you—“ There’s something like shame crawling up his throat, pulling heat up in his cheeks, setting his skin on fire. “I want—shit, I— _love_ me. Love me—let me—“ Levi’s fingers are gone, they’re gone, and he’s— “You’re _so_ good—to me. I want to love you for the—the rest of—“

Eren wasn’t making any sense anyway, he _knows_ he wasn’t, and his words die in his mouth when Levi pushes in. Just as _fucking_ slow as his fingers, just as slow as he’d been trying to take this whole thing, and the sound he makes stutters, sounds _desperate,_ and the sensations of two bodies hover like fog in front of his face. There is—there is so much—happening—

And Eren knows that he’s probably not going to last very long, even though Levi hasn’t even moved yet.

Levi’s face is tucked against Eren’s throat and he’s panting. His breath is warm, his whole _body_ is warm, and Eren remembers, dimly, that it’s winter. It’s winter right now, outside that window, but Levi is warm.

(There’s a memory. Of Mandalore. Of the fire, that night. Of the fact that they were alone and the conversation they had. But in that memory he isn’t looking at Levi’s face. He’s not looking at the pink on his cheeks, on his nose.

He’s looking at himself. He’s looking at himself and he’s thinking. He’s thinking that Eren’s lips are chapped, that Eren’s smile is something that more archaic societies have depicted in a countless number of artworks.

 _kiss him again_. That’s Levi’s voice, and Eren's face is so close. _kiss him again_.)

“Move,” Eren says, and for a moment he’d forgotten what he sounded like. “Please. Move.”

The only verbalization Eren gets is a groan that threatens to shake him apart.

And then Levi is _moving_.

It’s languid and unhurried, and while Eren knows that Levi is not, by nature, a man who rushes, Eren wishes he would this _one time_. Just—this isn’t _enough_ , not yet. The room is blurring at the edges, and Levi is so _warm_ , and they’re touching everywhere, and somehow it’s still not—it’s not enough, it’s not enough, it—

( _kiss him again_ )

“Kiss me.” Eren’s voice breaks, tears crawling down the sides of his face, curling behind his ears before they fall onto the pillows. “Kiss me.”

Levi stops completely and Eren almost _swears_ , almost threatens to throw him to the floor and file for _divorce_ —but then he pulls him up, shifts his own body, and Eren is seated on Levi’s cock while in his lap. And Levi is staring up at him, lifting his left hand to cup the side of Eren’s face. His thumb smears through the dampness on his cheeks.

“Kiss me,” Eren says again, breathless and—he’s getting close, he knows he is.

Levi tilts his head up and he says, “I love you so fucking much. You know that?”

“I know that,” Eren replies. “Now are you going to kiss me or—“

Levi _does_ kiss him just then, hard enough to bruise, and Eren rises up on thighs that threaten to drop him, easing back down on Levi in a way that gives birth to a series of tiny stars inside his chest, tightening the neverending coil of tension in gut even further. And he keeps going. He keeps going and Levi starts to puddle, starts to murmur incoherently, starts to say almost nothing but Eren’s name.

This is—he’s—oh _fuck_ —there’s just going to be ashes left of him, he’s sure, he’s sure. The kiss dissolves almost as soon as their lips meet, becoming a series of short kisses, punctuated by sharp exhales and the groaning of each other’s names, because words have stopped working for the both of them.

Eren comes not even five heartbeats later with a shout that tears at the lining of his throat. It’s sharp, scalds throat and his chest, explodes in the Force. He sees _stars_ , the birth of universes, sees—sees Levi, at the center of all that. He’s dying, he’s sure he’s dying.

Levi comes with him, keening high and loud, holding Eren close enough to smear their sweat against one another.

It takes a moment—two moments—three moments before Eren can see again, and he finds himself laying on the pillows, though he’s sure he was definitely sitting up before. There are fingers in his hair, stroking slowly, and there’s nothing crusted on his thighs. Or his stomach. Or anything like that.

“We’re married,” Eren says, when he means to say _what_. He finds Levi’s eyes glittering in the darkness. He was also sure that lights had been on not long ago.

“We are,” Levi replies, leaning forward from where he was propped on an open palm to kiss Eren’s forehead. “We’re also going to be married in the morning, so you can sleep without worries.”

“You’re making fun of me.” His throat feels raw. Eren wonders if he really had screamed that loudly, shouted that much. “I can’t believe you’re making fun of me, your husband.”

“I can’t believe you, my husband, are still talking when you could be sleeping.”

Levi drops onto the pillow and it sighs softly as if it’s new and unused. It might very well be, for all Eren knows. Levi’s fingers are still in his hair and he wiggles closer to make the new position easier on both of them.

He wants to keep his eyes open, wants to apologize for the loss of time between the rebirth of the universe and whenever he had been laid down, but he can’t. His tongue his heavy, and his chest his full, and his breaths are coming evenly.

“I love you,” Eren says, even though it’s hard for him to speak.

“I know,” Levi tells him in return. “I love you.”

Eren thinks he says _I know_. But he doesn’t know, for sure.

-

(Eren hadn’t been in bed in next morning. Levi had wrapped himself in Eren’s outermost robe, had padded around the house to find him sitting on the back porch, barely dressed even though there’s more snow on the ground than there had been the night before. And all Levi could do was open the door and stand there, watching. He hasn't been able to move from this spot, right here.

Eren’s left hand is held up toward the sun as he wiggles his fingers, his wedding ring catching the light.

“It’s beskar,” Levi says, a soft confession upon a white cloud, the time between indoors and out too short to take his breath away like that.

Eren turns, flushed with the chill and embarrassment. At least until he realises when Levi’s wearing.

“Beskar,” Eren repeats. “The lightsaber resistant metal.”

“Beskar,” Levi confirms. “The lightsaber resistant metal.” He pauses, thinks he remembers snippets of Eren’s dream the night before, the post-coital haze clinging to them both in a way that blurred the distinction between their presences in the Force.

He’d been falling through the stars.

Levi’s feet are bare and the porch is cold beneath then, but he takes a seat beside Eren anyway, and he says, “I don’t want you to think that anything could... come between us. Or something like that.”

“Beskar,” Eren says, again. “That’s virtually indestructible.”

“I know,” Levi tells him. There are other things he could say. He could explain how he didn’t want the Order getting in the way, anymore. Could tell him that this is the place that he wanted Eren to remember for the rest of his life, the sight of their first kiss and their first kiss as husbands. Could tell him that maybe they’ll retire here, on a world resistant to lightsabers and to people seeking conquest. Levi could say a lot of things.

But, instead, when he continues, he says, “I really fucking love you.”

Eren’s eyes glisten. They’ve been doing that a lot, recently. His eyes glisten and he reaches in the Force, finding Levi already there to meet him, to warm him from the inside out, to hold him as close as he can.

“I really fucking love you too,” Eren tells him.

Levi smiles, feels the weak winter sun as it touches his naked toes.

He’s never doubted Eren. And he’s not about to start now.

 _Bound in soul and body_ , as the saying went. And that was something he’d already known. He’d just wanted everyone else to know it too.)


End file.
